CEOs - a more complete look

I was reading a few of my own past posts, and realized that I have been pretty much unremittingly negative on the subject of the modern CEO. I have portrayed them as greedy and heedless of the havoc they create, and have only alluded to the idea that I don't consider them evil:

For me to explain why, for the most part, I don't consider them inherently evil, just people who have perverse incentives to do evil things, is not the post I want to write today. I'm not sure that they're amoral or sociopathic, though you'll find no shortage of people who believe so. Rather, I believe them to be a group that lives in a world in which social norms have been suspended, people who are able to rationalize almost any action as long as it leads them in the direction they want to go (yes, I understand that many people would consider that the embodiment of evil, and I won't argue).

I have picked on a few CEOs in particular, those who have said or done things that were demonstrably stupid or self-serving, like Randall Stephenson of AT&T:

My real criticism of Mr. Stephenson is that anyone who makes his kind of money should be a problem-solver. If your goal is to hire 5000 people, then you find a way to do it. You raise the starting salary. You provide a good working environment. You offer education benefits. You hire good customer service personnel away from other companies. You do something to find the source of the problem and take steps to solve it.

What you don't do is stand in front of a business group and whine about it. Let's say you give an assignment to one of your employees, maybe you tell a regional manager to increase sales in his area by 10%. When he or she comes back to you in a year and says, "I couldn't do it, my customers are too dumb to know that they should sign up for our wonderful services," would Mr. Stephenson find that an acceptable reason?

So it was clear to me that Mr. Stephenson didn't see the retrieval of these jobs as a real priority, as a problem to be solved.

And I certainly stand behind those statements, and others I've made. But I feel some need to draw out my logic on the subject a little further, as my expressed view up to now has not been particularly nuanced.

The first passage I quoted is essentially what I believe, that CEOs live in a world that provides them incentives for the actions they take. We have decided, through our continued election of public officials who believe that government's role is to step back and let business do its work (or even to support business), that financial might is inevitably right. We have allowed something of a moral calculus to emerge which says that people get lots of money because they deserve it, and they deserve it because the market has decided that's what they get (a bit of circular reasoning that closes off all subsequent discussion).

So your average CEO has two priorities:

1. The company needs to make as much money as possible
2. I need to make as much money as possible

[Those priorities are not necessarily listed in order.]

Their observed behavior follows inevitably from those priorities, and, as such, there is nothing pathological about it. Randall Stephenson doesn't whine about being unable to fill call center positions with Americans because he's frustrated, he does so to provide cover for keeping those jobs in lower-cost India, which is completely consonant with his goals.

The problem I have with this is that we expect these people to be different, that people in the media and people in Congress and people on the street expect these moguls to have answers to questions, solutions to problems, and treat them with enormous respect.

So Charlie Rose interviews the head of Cisco, who says the only way Americans can remain competitive is to obtain more education. Note that he doesn't pledge to hire any of these new graduates. The obvious inference is that he wants a domestic supply in case the Chinese and Indians decide they want too big a piece of the pie, but no one brings that up.

Congress invites Bill Gates to testify on the subject of H-1B visas. He's treated as a statesman, as an expert on labor law and immigration policies, and, unsurprisingly, picks the policy that will most benefit Microsoft (and himself).

The question is, why do we expect anything else? I know that we desperately want to believe that someone has answers to the problems that we face, and business people are great at presenting themselves as problem-solvers.

But the problems they're great at solving are not, how do we retain America's position in the world, or how do we educate the youth of America, or how do we square the rise of the multinational corporation with national interest overseas? Yet we go on asking these "experts" for their input, probably because we can't think of anybody else.

We have to stop this. Donald Trump may know how to put up a building, but it is downright misleading to ask him for his advice on the curriculum in the third grade. All Carly Fiorina knows about health care plans is that it's been a long while since she had to worry about what kind of coverage she has.

Business executives are limited people; it's how they've been trained, it's how they've risen to the top. There is no reason to think that they have any better advice about education or foreign policy than Derek Jeter could provide on the situation in Yemen, and we need to stop thinking they do. All information they give us is self-serving, which is fine - we have to stop believing it's something more.